The holy grail of interactive development has always been to fully engage the participant. This can be taken several ways:

1. To engage totally immersively, and let the person forget the physical world completely.
2. To make them feel for events in the virtual world, to such an extent that they have a real emotional response.

This category is focussed on the second one: how to make your participants feel connected to the world so strongly that it hurts when something bad happens, and the joy of a good time is profoundly real?

A Contiguous World
An article, written in 2000, for text based world creation, and how to create dense, rich, enjoyable worlds, that has lost none of its edge when applied to graphically built worlds ? where most of the problems this article addresses, still exist.

A Silent World
The value of sound is ofter overlooked when designing a virtual world, who, for all the prolieration of speaker systems, all too often concentrate on visual only - especially the non gameworlds.

Straight away, this world is assuming and attempting to reinforce stereotypes. It is designed for young girls, aged 5-13, and it is so over the top stereotypically feminine from a pre 1970?s male ideal it makes you feel sick.

Clich? Patterns
We strive to avoid clich? elements in our worlds, but what about those aspects that aren't clich? themselves, but, when taken as a group, are? Read this one.

Controlling Mood in a Social WorldSocial worlds have always been deeply rooted in the moods of their visitors. As in any social situation, whether in the physical, or virtual worlds, social interaction will change your mood. All this mayhem is beyond your control, or is it? Might there be ways to use the VR of the social world to your advantage? If not control the mood of your visitors, at least modify it a bit?

Not actually a history, as it does not delve into where cRPGs originally evolved from. Instead this book is a chronology of cRPGs, in the style of reviews of each one. Trends are not really fleshed out at any part, as the emphasis is on each individual RPG. However, this book is excellent source for anyone desiring to define trends.

NPCs are about more than just artificial intelligence. Before that, right at the baseline of them, is how to think about their creation, and use.

Monsters (or, Dragons and Orcs and Unicorns, Oh My!)
Monsters. Mobs, NPCs, Mobiles. Whatever they're named, they've been a staple of immersive worlds since the start. However, not enough thought seems to go into what to do with these beings, these denizens of a true world.

Monsters, Part 2
How to use simple proactive, and reactive scripting to create the idea that AI exists in your NPCs, without any AI programming. Just builder scripts and ingenuity.